The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Cyclical, Structural, or Systemic?

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By William I. Robinson

The crisis that exploded in 2008 with the collapse of the global financial system has been in the making since at least the late 1990s. How we understand it is not just an academic but a burning political question. I want to suggest in this essay that the global capitalism perspective I have put forth in recent years offers a powerful explanatory framework for making sense of this crisis. Following Marx, we should focus on the internal dynamics of capitalism to understand the Crisis; and following the global capitalism perspective, we should look for how capitalism has qualitatively evolved in recent decades. This system-wide crisis will not be a repeat of earlier such episodes in the 1930s or the 1970s precisely because world capitalism is fundamentally different in the early twenty-first century. READ THE ARTICLE >>